Thursday, December 31, 2015

The year draws to its close
tonight, and I'm joining others with my list of favorite books read in 2015! Fiction,
nonfiction, novels and short story collections. . . I didn't read as much as I would
have liked (I never do) but these are the ones that stayed most powerfully with
me.

The best novel I read this year was
a hard-to-pigeonhole, slipstreamish epistolary novel self-published in 2013. I
first heard of Francesca Forrest when I came across her lovely short story, Seven Bridges, in the archives of the digital magazine, The Future Fire. Pen Pal is
her first published novel (I think). It is gorgeous and affecting. These are
the first lines:

Dear
person who finds my message,

I
live in a place called Mermaid's Hands. All our houses rest on the mud when the
tide is out, but when it comes in, they rise right up and float.

They're
all roped together, so we don't lose anyone. I like Mermaid's Hands, but
sometimes I wish I could unrope our house and see where it might float to. .
.

Em is the child who places this
letter into a bottle and tosses it into the sea. Mermaid's Hands is an
imaginary village somewhere on the Gulf Coast of the United States. Em and her
people are a fictional cultural minority in the U.S. with their own sea-based religion, traditions,
and identity. They are also a marginalized group with a precarious existence,
treated with suspicion and disdain by their neighbors on the mainland.

Em's message-in-a-bottle finds its
way to a brave young woman on the other side of the world: Kaya, a political
activist fighting for the rights of her own cultural and ethnic minority group.
When Kaya receives Em's letter, it is brought to her by her pet crow, for Kaya
herself is unable to go to the sea. She is trapped in a prison-house suspended
over a live volcano.

The novel that unfolds is told in letters
exchanged between Em and Kaya, as well as in entries from their journals and
excerpts of news reports and other outside documents which flesh out their
world. This is a beautiful novel of arresting images—Kaya's volcano, Em's
floating village—and it flirts on the border between "realism" and
"magical realism." Both Em and Kaya's story lines are absorbing and
moving, and ultimately intersect. It's a book that tackles complex, real-world
issues of culture and marginalized ethnic communities, of identity and assimilation,
but it never feels preachy and it always feels honest. As Kaya's political storyline
picked up danger and speed, I started to feel impatience when reverting back to
Em's point of view. . . but then Em would suck me in with her own intimate, family
drama. This is a novel that works on multiple levels. I think it's a novel that
would work for multiple audiences. The story is accessible enough for
middle-grade readers (who would be Em's age), but complex and resonant enough
for adults as well. I keep marveling over how the author was able to pull off
everything that she does—how she was able, for instance, to create vivid
secondary characters and a delicate, heart-tugging love story in so few words.
This book made me cry. This is a book that stays with you.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

This book is more generally well
known than Pen Pal, to put it mildly. It won and was nominated for a slew of
literary awards, and was backed by George R.R. Martin for a Hugo. It's a
post-apocalyptic novel, but in a quiet vein. Lovely and elegiac, it moves back
and forth through time, following characters just before the great apocalypse that
has destroyed the world as we know it (the apocalyptic agent is a particularly
deadly strain of flu virus) and after. Above all, this novel set in the ruins
of civilization—where people reminisce about electricity and refrigerators and
episodes of Star Trek--is an ode to our present day, to the fragile beauties
and wonders we take for granted.

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (winner
of the 2015 Hugo Award)

Remember Golden Age science
fiction, as it's termed? Remember the mind-blown awe with which you read the
last lines of Isaac Asimov's Nightfall or Arthur C. Clarke's stories? The Three
Body Problem by Cixin Liu recaptured that for me. This story of alien first
contact left me dazzled with vast expanses of time and space and alien worlds. Bonus:
the prose (translated by Ken Liu from the original Chinese) is a great deal more
graceful than Asimov's workmanlike prose and much of the prose of the American
"Golden Age" of sci-fi.

Short Story Collections

Bone Swans by C.S.E. Cooney

Speaking of minds blown. . . Bone Swans collects five novellas by noted
short story writer C.S.E. Cooney; one of them, "The Bone Swans of
Amandale" appears for the first time. These are all rich, strange, and
utterly beautiful. The titular "Bone Swans" is a mashup of fairy
tales—the Juniper Tree plus The Pied Piper, graced with old legends of
swan-women and trolls, and narrated by a smart-alecky (and hungry) rat. "How
the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One" is a wonderfully
satisfying retelling of Rumpelstiltskin. Other stories are wholly invented
worlds. Cooney's stories are filled with wit and humor and horror and beauty,
and above all they are filled with heart.
One of my favorite story collections ever.

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

I'm trying to catch up on the contemporary
"canon" of speculative fiction, and at this point I think we can say
that Kelly Link is part of that canon. The stories in this collection will
reach into your braincase and pull your mind inside out. There's almost no way
to summarize a Kelly Link story; she defines her own subgenre of weird. My
favorites here were the titular "Magic for Beginners" and "Stone
Animals" (the latter is like a John Cheever story of suburban family
angst. . . shredded and pushed through the weirdest Filter of Weird that you
can—actually, you probably can't—imagine).

Redeployment by Phil Klay

And for my nongenre fiction
selection. . . You expect that a critically acclaimed short story collection
about the American war in Iraq will be devastating. But you likely don't know
how many different kinds of devastating these 12 stories will be. Marine
veteran Phil Klay shows an astonishing range here, inhabiting fully a variety
of voices: a young, barely-out-of-his-teens soldier trying to find his
refooting on American soil; officers in the midst of war; a Marine chaplain grappling with faith as he tries
to minister to the soldiers whom he sees spinning out of control; a Foreign
Services officer caught up in absurd bureaucracy; and a young Egyptian-American
Coptic Christian war veteran who tells his story while attending college at
Amherst in the aftermath of his service. These stories are all brutal and
devastating and brilliant. . . and many of them are also funny. Bleakly and blackly hilarious. The biting dialogue, the
gallows humor and bravado and pain and vulnerability of Klay's male characters
(they are all male protagonists) is a revelation. The most harrowing fiction
that I read this year.

Nonfiction

The Evil Hours: A Biography of
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by David J. Morris

While Klay's short story collection
is harrowing fiction, Morris' book is harrowing nonfiction. I read these two
books almost back-to-back, and they became companion pieces in my mind. Morris
calls his book a “biography” of PTSD, and it is deliberately modeled after
another biography of a disease: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s acclaimed The Emperor of Maladies: A Biography of
Cancer. Like Mukhjerjee’s book, Morris’ work is a deeply researched
synthesis of history, science, and personal experience. A former Marine
officer, Morris covered the Iraq War as a news correspondent from 2004 to 2007,
and himself suffered PTSD in the wake of his experiences there. This is a
fiercely intelligent, often infuriating, beautifully written and ultimately
moving book. Morris’ writing makes for compulsive reading, and I tore through
his pages as though through an airport thriller. The science and descriptions
of PTSD therapy may be of particular interest to scientists and clinicians, but
the human story at the heart of it all is what moves most powerfully.

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William
Finnegan

I'm not a surfer
and I know nothing about surfing. But yes, this is one of the best things I've
ever read. As I wrote in an earlier post, this is a book not just about surfing
but about questing in general—about chasing pure joy. My in-depth review of
this book can be found here.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and
Life by Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

This is one of
the (many) good things about my mothers' book club: I'm forced to read books I
would have never chosen on my own. Cheryl Strayed is most famous for Wild,
her runaway best-selling memoir of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. I admit that
I bounced off that memoir; I could acknowledge that the writing was good, but
the narrative simply wasn't one that personally spoke to me or engaged me. Tiny
Beautiful Things was different. This book collects highlights of the advice
column that Strayed has written in the persona of "Sugar" for the
website The Rumpus. The letters from readers are wide-ranging and yet, as
"Sugar" points out, they cut to a core of common human interests and
needs. Strayed's responses are wise, lyrical, and yes, profound. When the
mother of a child with a brain tumor writes in asking whether or not she can
believe in God if He gave her baby cancer. . . well, Strayed (who admits that
she does not personally believe in God) gives the best, most compassionate and
intellectually honest response I've ever seen articulated on this theme.
Strayed's responses are little jewel-like essays. In them she reveals pieces of
her own life, and in aggregate the advice columns become an unconventional
memoir.

Friday, December 4, 2015

I am happy to announce two new stories out this month."Moon Story" was published in October in the fall issue of Mythic Delirium. It is now available for free reading online as the featured December story. It is a fairy tale about questing, about growing up and letting go, and yes, it takes place on the Moon. A magical Moon of "snow and ice, of frozen lakes and deep blue shadows." Also bats and rats. The featured poetry of this month, "Star Fishing" by Shveta Thakrar and "Jupiter Dis(mis)ed" by J.C. Runolfson beautifully round out the celestial theme. Read the entire fall issue--it's all great stuff!My second story this month is "Knife and Sea," a little flash piece in the winter issue of Mirror Dance. This is also a fairy tale, but decidedly darker than "Moon Story." The winter issue of Mirror Dance is always devoted to flash fiction, poetry, and pieces that straddle the definitions of poetry and prose. Darkness and strangeness are threaded through this year's offerings. Again, take a look at the whole issue!And in other writing news. . . (Sigh). I have stories in queues at various publications, waiting for editors' final decisions. But, of course, I have no control over when those decisions will come or what they will be. I have control only over the writing itself.